Philadelphia VGC Warstory!

I woke up at like 5AM EST, about half an hour before my alarm was set to go off. Went and took a shower and whatnot, got my stuff ready, and left the house by about 6AM. Arrived at the convention center just after 7AM.

Stood around for a while, eventually pointing out to a swarm of rabid 13~ year olds that Marriland was Marriland, which created quite the ruckus! Said hi, shook hands with him at one point, and went to continue loitering a bit. I met Mosquitox in line. He asked me if I was from Smogon, and at that point I recognized the image on his shirt from his post the night before. While in line waiting for registration to start some writer from "The Examiner" handed me his card after seeing my JAA medal and asked me for an interview after the senior division was over.

Eventually they opened registration, I got #19, Ratatta. A few minutes after I was registered, I heard from ExpertEvan that he had arrived, and went to find him in line. Chatted him and his son up for a while, then met HnH and chatted with him for a bit.

I was on my way back to my car to grab a drink, since $2 for a can of coke is bullshit, and Carl called me. I grabbed my drink and found him in line. Evan, his son, and HnH found us shortly after, and we talked for a bit.

Eventually all of us were registered. We hung around bullshitting for a while, with BlueCookies joining our little group after he got registered. About 20-30 minutes before they put up the list of who got to play, the group of us headed back to the main room. This cocky little like 13 year old kid tried to sneak a peek at my DS, which resulted in me giving him a firm elbow to the chest. We spent the rest of the time waiting for the announcement making fun of random people and trying not to pass out from the large amount of fat nerd farts that were floating around the room. As one girl proclaimed, "Oh my god, it's worse than the Otakon game room!"

Finally they posted the list of numbers. Took a while to really see everything, since a bunch of tall people with big heads were crowded around the screens, which honestly should've been about 10' higher in the air so everyone could see them. Eventually, the big headed giants moved, and we were able to see....

NOBODY from the group of Smogoners that had gathered got in. 560+ people were signed up for the seniors event. I was #19. The first two numbers called were 10 and 22 =\ We grumbled for a minute, the crowd started thinning out, and we sorta just hung around unsure of what to do. I spotted Chuckie aka Shaka Khan, who made it to the NYC finals of JAA after winning the JAA Cincinnati stop. He didn't make the cut either, nor did his friend. Shaka left immediately, while most of us hung around and battled each other/randoms for about half an hour. Jonathan(that's his forum name) found our group after his R1 match, which he lost.. to DRAGON RUSH GARCHOMP. I battled him twice, and if my memory is correct it was one win for each of us. Eventually though, we started getting bored, and Carl and I left during the semifinals.

Props: The cool people I met. Oh, and Carl, I guess.
Slops: Nintendo, for fucking this up, HARD. Turning away 80-90% of the people wanting to play in your tournament PROBABLY means that you should figure out a way to let more people play. At the very least, having some sort of filter to weed out the people who have no clue what they're doing would be helpful. People with pokemon below level 50(not accounting for FEAR), etc.

The VGC's main faults for the most part fall under these two things:

1) The sign-up system -- The JAA preregistration system had some issues, sure. People signed up and didn't show, or signed up multiple times. It was still better than pulling names out of a hat, though. People knew ahead of time whether they had a guaranteed spot.

2) Location, location, location -- More specifically, not enough of them. Philadelphia ended up drawing pretty much all of New England, all of the East Coast above Virginia, as well as states from as far west as Wisconsin. There were even a few people from Toronto. As a result, barely anyone good got in, and people with things like Bubblebeam Empoleon and Flash Bronzong made it for 3 or 4 rounds.

So uh, yeah.. Nintendo, if you're reading this.. more locations, preregistration, and (I'm really going out on a limb here) better ventilation. Lots of gassy nerds are no fun for ANYBODY.

Hmm.. well like all Chomps run Yache, so I might as well get rid of it early. I know Blizzard won't kill it, so meh. And it might be running Fire Fang, or another Helping Hand Gengar (Ran into a lot of Helping Hand Pokemon that day). So I figured Ice Shard to get rid of Yache, and Trick Room to turn the tides of the early game. Problem is, with the thoughts of Helping Hand running rampant in my mind, I forgot about Taunt...

I wish I could have met you guys and Expert Evan. Since you weren't able to make it I wanted to represent Smogon in the tourny and ended up winning by almost pure luck. And i forgot to Taunt Vash's Slowking cuz I was too stupid to remember that it could us TR. That almost cost me the match too.

hahaha, i was one of the big heads i guess, i waited in front of one of the TV screens for about 45 mins because i knew they would get swarmed. I had #132 Ditto, and he didnt get picked. I was thinking about asking the staff if he could use "transform" to change into one of the pokemon that was picked, but i said forget it and left....

Moderator

So it was time for the screen to display our numbers, so here it goes...

First number displayed on screen was #10, oh the first 9 did not get in, this has got to be crazy, then I noticed #19 was chosen and that was TTS' number on his wristband, yay TTS got in. next screen I heard boos because the number for krabby did not get in, then a yay from one that had tangela. few more screens, #214 shows up, yay my son gets to participate, so at least on of us joins. Next screen #265, yay that's my number and yes both father and son compete once again. Later I hear that Carl, BlueCookies, Bonta-Kun and everyone together also got in. This is great, Smogon domination is now underway. So we head into the registration area and made sure we all split up so we don't have to face each other until the top 16 at least. Now onto the matches:

Match 1: With the thoughts if 2006 JAA still haunting me, I wanted to make sure I got off to a good start, so I sent out my 2 leads while my opponent sends out a staravia and forgot what was the other. while staravia's intimidate made it so my pokemon could not OHKO on first turn, I was able to switch in and out and easily win this match. 4-0

Match 2: What, a level 39 leafeon in this party? one of my lead pokemon made a move that OHKO'd both pokemon while my other pokemon did protect. It was all over within a few turns. While I don't like to gloat about such wins, I could tell this guy looked at himself in disbelief after what happened. 4-0

Match 3: Hmmm, this guy had an empoleon that did bubblebeam while a rhyperior did thunderbolt. While it paralyzed one of my pokemon, it was still yet another easy win. 4-0

Great! so I have once again made it to the top 16 like I did last year, they hack checked my games and said everything was fine, so transferring my pokemon to a new game was worth it after all since I was so nervous about it the day before. It turned out that my son also made it to the top 16 very easy and so did all the other smogonites that showed up, including TTS, Carl, BlueCookies, Bonta-Kun, Pokethan, VashTheStampede, sandman, and oh was this going to get very interesting.

Next thing I knew I woke up from my dream and I was like god damn it it was all yesterday which never happened...

So it was time for the screen to display our numbers, so here it goes...

First number displayed on screen was #10, oh the first 9 did not get in, this has got to be crazy, then I noticed #19 was chosen and that was TTS' number on his wristband, yay TTS got in. next screen I heard boos because the number for krabby did not get in, then a yay from one that had tangela. few more screens, #214 shows up, yay my son gets to participate, so at least on of us joins. Next screen #265, yay that's my number and yes both father and son compete once again. Later I hear that Carl, BlueCookies, Bonta-Kun and everyone together also got in. This is great, Smogon domination is now underway. So we head into the registration area and made sure we all split up so we don't have to face each other until the top 16 at least. Now onto the matches:

Match 1: With the thoughts if 2006 JAA still haunting me, I wanted to make sure I got off to a good start, so I sent out my 2 leads while my opponent sends out a staravia and forgot what was the other. while staravia's intimidate made it so my pokemon could not OHKO on first turn, I was able to switch in and out and easily win this match. 4-0

Match 2: What, a level 39 leafeon in this party? one of my lead pokemon made a move that OHKO'd both pokemon while my other pokemon did protect. It was all over within a few turns. While I don't like to gloat about such wins, I could tell this guy looked at himself in disbelief after what happened. 4-0

Match 3: Hmmm, this guy had an empoleon that did bubblebeam while a rhyperior did thunderbolt. While it paralyzed one of my pokemon, it was still yet another easy win. 4-0

Great! so I have once again made it to the top 16 like I did last year, they hack checked my games and said everything was fine, so transferring my pokemon to a new game was worth it after all since I was so nervous about it the day before. It turned out that my son also made it to the top 16 very easy and so did all the other smogonites that showed up, including TTS, Carl, BlueCookies, Bonta-Kun, Pokethan, VashTheStampede, sandman, and oh was this going to get very interesting.

Next thing I knew I woke up from my dream and I was like god damn it it was all yesterday which never happened...